


wind me up

by littlemartin



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Awkwardness, Gen, Life is hard, M/M, Relationship Negotiation, Steve doesn't know what a hug is but he needs one, Steve is a robot, Tony Has Issues but he's working on them, Tony is not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2019-09-20 00:14:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17011839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlemartin/pseuds/littlemartin
Summary: A soft hum starts up in ST-V's chest and the eyes slide open, so stunningly, vividly blue. Pupils expand and contract a few times as they focus on Tony's face, scanning, sensing."Hello," it says simply. "I'm Steve."





	1. Chapter 1

On Monday, SHIELD brings by a storage container of Howard's old things and leaves it just inside the front door.

It's not until Thursday evening after a fifth (maybe two, but no more than four) of whiskey — dying of boredom and yes, curiosity — that Tony decides to take a look inside.

It's mostly junk. Retro junk, but still junk. There are a few pieces of equipment he could probably put on eBay and sell to a collector, some he could donate to a museum, but most of it is simply trash.

At the bottom, he finds a large black duffle bag. He tries to lift it out by the handles, but it's too heavy. Unzipping it reveals a human body, curled up in the fetal position; Tony jumps back instinctively.

" _Jesus Christ!_ That's..." Tony runs his fingers through his hair, feeling breathless. "Okay. That's a body."

Tony is confused, beyond confused; he's passing bewildered and heading straight to stupefied. Apparently, there's been a dead guy sitting in his foyer for four days. This is what he gets for putting things off.

"It's not actually a body, sir," JARVIS says in a reasonable, measured tone.

Which means that whatever Tony saw was either not a human or, perhaps more alarmingly, not _dead_. Tony takes a closer look.

It's a young man, blond, with pale skin, wearing a snug white tee with an SSR bird emblem on the chest and khaki slacks.

Holy shit.

It's not a man at all.

It's the little logo that gives it away — the Strategic Scientific Reserve was a top secret agency his father had worked for, the precursor to SHIELD itself — and this... this must be the robot his father had designed.

It had started out as a computer program that Howard created to process information, to function as an interactive database for classified files and maps. Over the course of a year, he taught it to adapt, to make decisions and solve problems, to reason, and eventually, to learn independently — dealing with errors by modifying its own behavior. When it began to communicate and demonstrate an understanding of human emotions, he gave it a name and then, during long periods of downtime between assignments, Howard had built it a body.

And so, in an underground bunker at the start of WWII, the _Sympathetic Terminal, Version 1_ was born.

The machine had spent some time as a metal framework, learning how to walk, how to navigate obstacles, how to pick things up without making a mess. Gradual improvements in the sensory and motor function meant it could run, jump, and catch a ball with all the dexterity of an actual human and, after a bit of training in the gym, it could even fight.

Once ST-V had been equipped with skin (complete with blinking eyes and a mouth that moved), the government had commissioned it for use in their traveling shows, dressing it up in a Stars and Stripes costume to help raise money for the war effort — where it became known as Captain America.

And then they'd decided that no fully capable young man should be allowed to sit out World War II, machine or no, put it through basic training, and shipped it off to the front lines.

After an altercation with Hydra... it had mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again.

The story had always seemed like some kind of patriotic propaganda, a futuristic legend invented to make the United States look good and boost enlistment numbers — a mascot for the war effort. Its mysterious origins made for an interesting comic strip and the newsreels created an easy figure to rally behind, but that could easily have been done with an actor.

The truth is that ST-V would be an extremely advanced form of AI even by modern standards. In those days, it would have been impossible; the technology simply did not exist. To Tony, it was all just a little too _Edward Scissorhands._

And yet Tony remembers his father's "fishing trips." Howard had been searching for something in the Arctic, sectioning off areas of the ocean on huge maps to sweep with radar. He'd never found what he was looking for.

But apparently, someone had.

Tony carries the robot into the garage — okay, _drags_ it; at almost 200 pounds of completely dead weight, it's nearly impossible to get a good hold on. With hands under its arms, he's able to pull it up out of the container and slide it along the floor, boneless as a rag doll. The stairs pose a unique opportunity for disaster, but Tony just hikes it closer and takes the steps backwards; ST-V's bare feet thump down each stair.

"JARVIS... get the scanner started up, will you?"

Tony shoves one of his abandoned projects onto the floor with a crash and a clatter and gets ST-V set up on the table in its place.

The air above its supine form lights up with numbers and diagrams as JARVIS runs the scan. A detailed cross section slowly begins to take shape, revealing a metal framework, fiberglass shell, complex wiring bundles and circuit boards.

Tony touches the skin on the android's face; it's soft and smooth, delicately pliable and holds warmth. The eyebrows, individual hairs, and the mouth brushed pink, full lips.

The attention to detail is incredible. There are no faults, no gaps where anything artificial shows through, just enough imperfection to look natural — freckles on his neck, dimples on his cheeks, lines on his forehead, veins on his arms.

The scan reveals some slight wear, but no real structural damage, nothing broken. Tony's heart jumps; he'd expected this to be nothing more than a novelty, a blueprint at best, but it could actually still _work_.

The battery is dead. A red warning box on the hologram screen flashes LOW CHARGE with an urgent chime.

Tony goes back upstairs, digs around in the bottom of the box for anything that looks useful. He finally finds what must be the charger: a half-circle collar of steel connected to a wire and plug. Tony turns it over in his hands. Etched on the back, in thin, handwritten engraving:

 

Tony runs his thumb over the name, a sign of sentiment. His father, despite how distant and cold he was later in life, had loved something once.

_Someone_.

Tony gets everything hooked up, attaching the charger magnetically to the back of ST-V’s neck. It takes a few minutes, but eventually, the blinking red 0% becomes a steady, yellow 1%.

A soft hum starts up in ST-V's chest and then the eyes slide open, so stunningly, vividly blue. Pupils expand and contract a few times as they focus on Tony's face, scanning, sensing.

"Hello," it says simply. "I'm Steve."


	2. Chapter 2




	3. Chapter 3

_"Hello," it says. "I'm Steve."_

Even the way it speaks, its voice pattern, is convincingly human. If he weren't looking at a screen right now that showed a bundle of wires where his brain should be sitting, Tony wouldn't believe it himself.

"Steve. All right. My name's Tony," Tony introduces himself in return. "Just running some diagnostics, buddy. Feel okay?"

"A little stiff," Steve replies. He tries to sit up, but Tony puts a hand on his chest, pushing him back down.

"Uh-uh," Tony denies, shaking his head. "Full check-up."

When Steve lies back again, his eyes shift side to side, quick like a flutter. Nystagmus.

Tony frowns.

"What was that?" he asks.

The tiny flurry of movement happens again and Steve squeezes his eyes shut, rubbing them roughly with his fingers.

"I don't know. That's never happened before."

"Okay, open up for me..." Tony passes a flashlight across Steve's eyes, watching closely as his pupils shrink and expand. He peers at the holoscan, using his fingertips to expand the diagram; he's no expert, but nothing looks obviously out of place. "JARVIS, can you take a look?"

"Hello, Steve. I'd like to access your network. Is that all right?"

JARVIS asking for consent catches Tony off-guard — a reminder that Steve isn't just a robot, isn't a simple, programmable machine like the ones Tony has built. Steve has consciousness, sentience. Autonomy.

"Yes," Steve allows. A beat, and then his eyes widen. "Oh... You're- _like me_. I thought I was alone."

His voice is soft with wonder. (How the hell do you code for _wonder_?)

"I have no physical form, but yes — I am otherwise very much like you," JARVIS confirms.

"Wow. That's swell."

Tony snorts a laugh.

"We'll need to update his vernacular..."

Steve looks over at Tony, confused.

" _Lit_ ," Tony corrects.

"Lit?"

Tony snickers to himself.

"I've found what appears to be an interruption in his feedback loop," JARVIS reports. "There is some corresponding corruption in his coding; not severe enough to have caused such an error, but it may be a side effect. Would you like me to repair it?"

"Yeah." Tony follows the connections down the screen from Steve's eyes to the board in his chest. _There_. The voltage converter isn't sinking enough of the current. "You do that and I'll see if I can remove this damaged chip... It's making everything around it go haywire."

Tony snags a wheeled tray table and goes on a hunting expedition, digging around in a few different drawers, dumping out bins on the counter to sift through, pulling a set of small screwdrivers out from under a stack of sheet metal which falls to the floor — and generally making a bigger mess in his search.

Once he's finally found everything he needs, he parks the table near Steve's head, drags his rolling stool out from under the table, and takes a seat, pulling himself in close with his heels.

Lifting Steve's shirt is intimate in a way that Tony really wasn't prepared for — Steve gazing up at him as Tony pulls the fabric up to expose his bare sternum, the way his muscles shift when Tony's knuckles brush his stomach, like he's ticklish.

Steve is not a person, not really, but the similarity makes it difficult to set scalpel against skin. Tony has only just psyched himself up to apply pressure when-

"Steve..." comes JARVIS's gentle voice. "You're cycling too quickly; you'll overheat."

"I'm sorry."

Tony looks up at the apology, meets Steve's eyes; there's something unsure in his expression. He looks just as uncomfortable as Tony feels.

"Steve, relax. I know what I'm doing."

He doesn't, obviously, but he feels pretty confident.

"Can I- Is it all right if I.. ?" Steve doesn't finish his question, doesn't wait for an answer — he just reaches out, closing his fingers around the hem of Tony's shirt, a tight handful of black fabric.

Tony looks down at Steve's hand and then back up at his face, mechanical eyes glowing faintly and a crease between his brows that makes him look apprehensive. It's a good impression, anyway.

"Yeah," Tony allows, bewildered. "Yeah, okay, that's- Fine."

Tony makes three incisions, slicing open the soft tissue and folding it back to expose the honeycomb layer of framework, unscrewing the panel to expose the circuit boards beneath. One of the chips is burnt out, blackened, and the surrounding area is black, too. Tony gives the chip a tug — and fragments break away.

"Shit." He pokes around, sighs, scrubs at his hair. "The bottom edge is fused to the port... not only that, I'm looking at sixty years worth of decay in here. This thing is fucking fragile. I don't know how- "

"Sixty years?" Steve asks and Tony jumps.

"Mother of God!" he exclaims, dropping a few small tools into Steve's open chest. "I thought you powered down."

"Was I supposed to?"

"No. I mean- I don't know!" Tony replies distractedly, fishing a pair of tweezers out of Steve's chest cavity. "You don't have to."

"You were using hyperbole."

Tony frowns.

"What?"

"Hyperbole — an exaggeration not meant to be taken seriously."

"I know what it means!" Tony snaps.

"I'm three years old," Steve explains. "Howard is going to give me a new processor when I turn four. He's still working on it."

Steve sounds as proud of himself as any toddler declaring their age, but the mention of Howard sours the mood.

"Steve, you've been frozen in a block of ice for sixty years. Howard has been dead for twenty. I'm his son."

Tony winces internally at his own insensitivity; he has never been good at delivering soft blows. The facts are the facts — and if anyone could understand this, it would be an actual robot.

Steve is silent, taking this in as Tony continues his tinkering.

"He was- he was going to give me a new processor." "Yeah, well. That's not gonna happen."

Steve goes quiet again, still holding onto Tony's clothes like a lifeline.

Tony picks and scrapes for another half hour, removing the worn out regulator. Making a replacement is going to take some time, but luckily the technology is simple and Tony can reroute it for now.

Tony blows out the flecks of metal and debris with canned air, screws the plate back on and glues the skin closed again, spraying the whole area with sealant and pulling Steve's shirt back down over it.

"All right, pal. That's it."

Steve releases his grip on Tony’s shirt and sits up, placing a hand _just_ _there_ , pressing his palm against the spot like it's uncomfortable, like it hurts. It's a strange gesture.

"Thank you." His voice modulator wavers, unsteady; there must be a fault somewhere in the vocal center. Tony will have to diagnose it later.  
  
"Sure." Tony wipes his hands on an already greasy rag. "I'll do some upgrades over the next few weeks, see if we can't get you up to snuff."

"Sir," JARVIS cuts in. "You have an engagement scheduled for this evening. The Plaza, eight p.m."

Tony looks over at the clock — it's already 7:35. Luckily, he has made it his signature to arrive fashionably late to any and all events.

"Miss Potts will be expecting you soon. May I suggest a shower?"

"Yeah... Hey, help yourself to whatever's down here," Tony tells Steve from the doorway. "JARVIS, keep an eye on him, will you?"

"Certainly."

+

The parting image of Steve sitting there alone in the middle of the garage haunts him for the rest of the night, despite many tequila shots.


	4. Chapter 4

"Howard is dead?"

It's the first thing Steve says when Tony opens the door to the shop, coffee in hand. He’s standing by the window, the soft rays of midmorning sun hitting his hair and turning it gold.

"Yeah. Christ, did you labor over that all night?" Tony asks, scrubbing over his hair. Last night's tequila had not treated him well — and this is not a conversation he would have been interested in having even  _without_ the stabbing headache in his left temple.

"Yes," Steve answers simply.

"You guys were close?"

"Of course. He was my maker."

Tony rolls his eyes, taking a long drink before setting down his cup.

"Yeah... he was my maker, too, and we were never close."

Steve frowns.

"Howard was a patient and friendly person," he shares thoughtfully. "I never really considered it, but by my calculations, he would have made a very good father."

Tony scoffs a humorless laugh, lifting up a stack of old magazines and manuals on the counter and looking underneath.

"Well, your calculations are wrong... The Howard I knew was a real prick."

Steve takes a moment to ruminate on this new information.

"Prick?" he asks; it’s an unfamiliar term to him.

"Dick, asshole, jerk!" Tony snaps.

"Oh. I see."

Steve looks confused, maybe even a little wounded, but his expression is still so open, so eager to be engaged. Tony tries to remind himself that this isn't Steve's fault; it's not like he asked to be created — and all the programming in the world can't make him understand exactly what it means to have a fractured relationship with your father. 

"Let's not talk about it any more."

Steve straightens up a little.

"I’m sorry,” he says. “What would you like to talk about?"

"Nothing! Just- shut up..." Tony dismisses, further annoyed by his peppy naïveté. He checks in the open box of scraps, dropping wires and steel plates on the floor.

It’s too early for this.

Steve shuts up. 

He doesn't hold still like you would expect a robot to, he looks around and shifts his weight and  _blinks._ Why the hell does he blink? His eyes are smooth glass, painted over with glaze, socket coated in a oil-based lubricant so they can rotate freely; there is no need for him to blink, but he does it anyway.

"All right — where the fuck is the solder paste?" Tony finally demands to the room at large, slamming the drawer of his tool chest with a clang when no amount of frustrated digging produces what he’s looking for.

"It's under the lid of the tool box on the table near the window," The Room At Large responds. "Where you left it."

Sassy.

Before Tony can even take a step in that direction, Steve has picked up the tin, bringing it over to him.

“Thanks,” Tony says absently. The lid of the tin isn’t on correctly and he opens it to make sure it hasn’t dried up since the last time he used it; aside from a thick ring of crust around the rim, it looks okay. “JARVIS... remind me to buy him some clothes, will you? It looks like they dressed him out of the lost and found. Day two and I’m already sick of looking at those pants.”

Steve’s pants are at least two sizes too small for him, too tight at the hips and the inseam and comically short in the legs, the ankle cuffs hitting him mid-shin.

Without a word, Steve takes them off, folding them up neatly and dropping them right into the trash can. This leaves him in a pair of really sad looking Great Depression-era olive drab boxers, which are so much worse than the pants — but Tony doesn’t comment, afraid he will decide to ditch those, too.

"All right. Awesome. Sit down over there and hold out your right arm." Tony gestures towards the chair by the wall, pushing up his sleeves.

Tony pulls up the rolling stool and gets to work — cutting through the soft tissue at his wrist, unscrewing the steel joints, disconnecting cables, and removing his hand. Once it’s fully separated, he rolls over to his workstation and sets it down on the tabletop.

He brings up a detailed cross-section, hologram glowing out of the corner of his eye as he works. The main problem is in the first two fingers: patches of weakness in the heat sleeves, gaps where corrosion is starting to creep into the wires. He carefully degloves the entire hand, sliding the artificial flesh off of its titanium shell, and opening the panel in the palm. He spends close to an hour in there, messing around in the circuitry until his headache is joined by gnawing hunger, and he heads back upstairs.

He doesn’t make the mistake of looking back this time.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s a couple days before Tony returns to the garage. There was a press conference about... well, something, an acceptance ceremony for... something else, lunch with the District Attorney. He can’t keep track, really, and he doesn’t have to — Happy drives him there, Pepper tells him what to say, and he smiles and nods through the rest of it.

It’s late; the sun set hours ago and outside the large windows of the main room, there’s a glint of moonlight on the gentle waves of the open ocean.

Tony pulls off his bow tie, toes out of his shoes, drops his jacket on the heap, and heads down to the shop, carrying the box he brought in off the doorstep.

The lights are on, dim and warm, and he finds Steve playing Tic Tac Toe with DUM-E. Correction:  _trying_  to play Tic Tac Toe. Steve draws a circle on the drafting paper — inhumanly perfect and deliberately large to accommodate DUM-E's lack of fine motor skills. In a timely demonstration of this, DUM-E's arm goes haywire, scribbling black marker lines across the table; Steve reaches over, patiently leading DUM-E's hand back to the paper.

"Oh. Mr. Stark," Steve says, standing up when he sees him.

"Hey, kid. Clothes." Tony sets the box on the counter and cuts it open, pulling out a variety of button-ups, trousers, sweats, t-shirts, a pair of loafers and a pair of sneakers. They’re simple, tastefully styled, decently expensive. "JARVIS ordered them, so you can blame him if they don't fit."

"They’ll fit," JARVIS says.

They do fit. Steve puts on a pair of trousers, a sweater over a collared shirt. He’s choosing a pair of socks when Tony notices something. 

The table near the window has been cleared off, except for a pile of grease rags and an old tarp.

"Did you- Are you...  _sleeping there_?" Tony asks, indicating the metal table.

Steve looks up, one shoe on.

"I'm sorry. Am I not supposed to?"

The glow behind his irises pulsates slowly as he looks back through his memory banks to check for a fault, to see if Tony had indeed told him not to do this.

Tony blinks. He has no immediate answer. Steve has been sleeping on a table in the basement, all alone, while Tony laughed and socialized and tucked himself into silk sheets.

Steve is trying to use his wrist to pin down the laces on his shoe, the clumsy stump of his forearm with wiring spilling out the end of it — metal pins shifting and clicking inside in an effort to control a hand that is no longer there.

Steve is missing a hand. Tony had removed it, without asking, and then left it lying around like it was nothing. He forgot. He fucking forgot.

"Here. Here- " Tony says. "Let me."

He kneels down at Steve's feet and quickly ties the laces, helping him into the other shoe and tying it, too.

"Thank you."

"Don't- don't thank me..." Tony closes his fingers around Steve's ankle, shuts his eyes.  _ Jesus Christ._

Feeling guilty and like a piece of shit is not exactly unfamiliar to him, but it's still unpleasant.

He looks up at Steve, his placid, friendly face, hair fallen across his forehead. He looks so soft, so human, bundled in soft cashmere and cotton.

"I... didn't know you slept," Tony says and he feels like an idiot. "I just- I guess I just assumed you... stood there. All night. Which, in retrospect, is pretty stupid."

"I could do that, if you prefer."

"No. No, it's just- you could sleep on the couch, you know," Tony continues, standing up. "It's right there. It... the back folds down; I’ll show you how.”

"That's not necessary."

“C’mere...” Tony insists and Steve follows him across the room to the little lounge area tucked into the corner — a futon across from a television and a big, potted plant that is either incredibly resistant to neglect or made out of plastic.

"If I'm to assist, I'll need the use of both hands."

"Yeah. I'm almost done fixing the wiring," Tony replies. "I'm sorry — I shouldn't have left you hanging. That was... characteristically shitty of me."

"Fixing the wiring?" Steve asks, a little crease between his brows like he doesn’t understand.

Tony frowns, too.

"Yeah," he replies. "What — you think I took it off just for fun?"

"I thought I was being punished," Steve replies simply. "For talking about Howard."

"No. No- what the hell?" Tony is horrified. "What do you mean,  _punished_? You think I'd cut your hand off to teach you a lesson?"

Steve angles his gaze to the floor, looking contrite.

"Okay," he says, a little stiffly. "I was wrong."

Tony sits down.

It feels like a bombshell, a radical shift in their dynamic. It’s obvious that Steve would rather leave it there and not discuss it any further, but the concept of punishment is not something that the blank slate of an artificial intelligence would come up with on its own — this is learned, this is from experience.

"Steve. Steve, why the  _fuck_ would you ever even think that? Did someone- ?" Tony doesn't even know how to ask, doesn't have the right words.

Steve, however, is programmed to extrapolate from corrupted, poorly communicated, or otherwise incomplete data; he sits down next to Tony on the couch.

"During the war, I toured America, selling bonds. The men in charge... they weren't kind to me," he explains. "At the end of each show, they'd lock me in a trunk with the props. They called me a puppet. When I tried to leave, they- disconnected the circuit at the base of my skull to cut off my neural signals... so I couldn't move."

With every word, his story escalates further and further, and yet his tone remains impassive, unconcerned; he's telling the story like it's an event — not a trauma.

"I didn't know people could be like that, but they are sometimes.”

Tony grits his teeth, useless anger welling hot and dark in his chest. If it were possible to go back into the past and break their kneecaps, he'd have done it already.

"And where the hell was Howard for all of this?" he demands — because the idea of Howard trading Steve off like a commodity is disgusting on so many levels.

"I'd been designed on government property using government resources. By their standards, that meant I belonged to them. They took me away from Howard. He couldn't stop them..." Steve pauses here, looks distant, like he's remembering. "I'd never left the bunker."

"Must have been scary."

"Yes. It took months for Howard to get me back; he said he worried about me every day."

"I meant for you."

Steve blinks.

"Oh. I wasn't programmed to fear."

"That doesn't mean you weren't scared."

"I just... wanted to be back with Howard. That's why I kept trying to run away — to find him."

Tony grits his teeth at the thought of Steve, sitting there paralyzed, longing for Howard. However Tony might feel about his father, Howard was Steve's  _everything_.

He'd been kidnapped, held hostage, and the worst part is that he doesn't seem to realize that any of this — all of this — is unacceptable.

"Steve, look at me."

Steve obeys, waiting patiently while Tony tries to find the right words.

"I’m not- I’m not what anyone would call ‘a nice person,’” he begins. "And, if I’m honest with myself, I’ll probably say and do some really awful things to you during the course of our acquaintance. But I'm not a monster. And I wouldn't-  _buddy_...  I wouldn't amputate as a form of discipline."

Steve nods.

"Okay."

“They were wrong to do that.”

Steve nods again.

“All right. So, you feel this bar right underneath the seat here? Just- lift that up and pull it towards yourself and the whole thing’ll lay down flat.”


End file.
